$1m gift has Australian Ballet dancing for joy

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A ballet fan since he was a teenager, retired lawyer Kenneth Reed watches dancers rehearse for the Australian Ballet, to which he has donated $1 million.Photo: Simon O'Dwyer

A retired Sydney lawyer who considers the Australian Ballet his
family has given it $1 million, the biggest one-off private
donation in the company's history.

Kenneth Reed, 68, handed the cheque to the ballet's artistic
director David McAllister in front of ecstatic dancers and staff at
the company's Southbank headquarters yesterday.

McAllister said later that Mr Reed, a subscriber since the
ballet's 1962 founding, had indicated last August that he would
increase his annual donation of several hundred dollars to $10,000.
But he dropped the bombshell a month later when he and McAllister
lunched with the ballet's head of endowments, Kenneth Watkins. "He
said, 'Well I'd like to support the ballet, and I feel I have a sum
in mind.' And Kenneth said to him, 'What would that be, Ken?' He
said, 'I think a million dollars'.

"I think we both burst into tears," McAllister said.

McAllister said Mr Reed's gift, to be named the Kenneth R. Reed
Fund, would enable the Australian Ballet to do "a lot of new work,
a lot of the big classical repertoire which is very expensive to
stage".

Mr Reed started going to the Borovansky Ballet at the
Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown, Sydney, in the 1950s. "I thought
the music was lovely and the dancers were very talented. It sort of
made a lasting impression on me," Mr Reed said.

He retired seven years ago as a senior partner in a George
Street law firm. He lives on Macquarie Street, a stroll to the
Sydney Opera House for evenings at the ballet with friends or a
cousin. He is not married and doesn't have children, and says the
ballet people are like family.

His late father, Sir Reginald Reed, was a wharfie who rose to
become the head of Australia's largest stevedoring company, James
Patrick and Co. Mr Reed said Sir Reginald had instilled in him "the
value of the individual in the sense of serving the community and
employing people".

It's to provide a future for the ballet, so they can expand their repertoire.

"One reason I made this gift is I feel it will provide
employment for people in the arts. It's to provide a future for the
ballet, so they can expand their repertoire, and the artistic
director can commission new works which will give employment to
choreographers and designers and musicians and dancers and all the
people who are connected with the art of ballet."

Mr Watkins said Mr Reed's was the "highest individual donation
to the Australian Ballet in one hit". The next highest was a
$900,000 bequest from Melbourne businessman Keith Christiensen in
1996 that bailed the ballet out of financial strife.

The ballet's private endowment fund, created in 2003, has grown
from $6 million to a forecast $12 million by the end of this
year.The goal is to have it at $25 million by the company's 50th
birthday in 2012.

Mr Reed said: "I have always, in my life, tried to keep a low
profile." But he criticised a "paucity of government arts funding"
(of which the ballet gets $5.2 million annually), and called for
more private philanthropy.